Eat the City(3)

In libraries and archives and private homes, I paged through stacks of books, letters, journals, drawings, and photos related to the sugar trade in the 1700s, beer brewing in the 1800s, meatpacking in the 1900s. In a growing global metropolis, pumping out wealth, I began to piece together a picture of a hidden city where people concerned themselves with food and drink.

Perhaps it’s only natural that this behemoth of a port city early on became a center of commercial food manufacturing. At one time or another, the land that became New York City led national production of oysters, coffee, sugar, vegetables, milk, yogurt, ice cream, margarine, beer, and kosher wine.

Long past the golden age of agriculture in New York, some urbanites continued to make their own basic foods. Homemade food appeared during times of economic, political, and cultural crisis. When people have lost their jobs or endured wars and prohibitions—in times of scarcity—they have been pressed into production. They have grown vegetables on the fire escape, kept rabbits for stews, and crushed grapes to make wine. They have foraged their own greens and berries in parks and brewed their own beer. Often they have been newcomers who insist on their own vision of the good life, in which food comes from trusted hands: their own or their neighbor’s.

Cities have resources that people can tap in surprising ways. Amid the concrete and glass and steel are untended bits of wildlife, where invasive Japanese knotweed can be gathered to use like rhubarb, beach plums can be picked by the water, tree ear fungus can be harvested for hot and sour soup, blackberries can be hunted in a shaded grove, and dandelion greens in the sun. Cities also have train depots and shipping docks, where grapes can be imported for making wine, hops and barley can be brought in for beer, and raw sugar for refining. Big warehouses and expansive rooftops provide space where people can innovate new ways of intensive farming. Unpoliced neighborhoods and genteel blocks will tolerate chickens; fish can be caught on piers and bridges and boats and in aquaponic systems and basement tanks. People will always find ways to summon these resources to survive and thrive. They will use the geography of the city, its soil, its water, its light, its space, its transportation connections, its human creativity and energy—and its hunger—to produce food.

Look at old maps and you’ll find food written all over the city in names that recall personal and local preoccupations. Parts of Harlem have been known as Goatsville and Pig’s Alley. Hog Island, meanwhile, had been named by the Dutch who raised pigs there; Pigtown was an area in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn where pigeon houses and chicken coops thrived as well as pigs; and Hog Town was a part of Midtown whose recidivist pig keepers resisted swine clearance efforts with guns. Various Bone Alleys grew up throughout the city near the homes of professional bone pickers; West Twelfth Street and West Thirty-Ninth Street were both once called Abattoir Place, after local businesses. On Skinner Street, now Cliff Street, butchers sold animal skeletons as well as hides still attached to horns and tails; people used the skulls to decorate their storefronts and carriages; and kids built animal-skin forts they would defend from other gangs. Pearl Street was named after the discarded oyster shells that littered it long ago. Sugar Loaf Street, today’s Franklin Street, was named for a sugar house. On the Brooklyn waterfront, Java Street was named for the coffee unloaded from ships coming from the other side of the world. Mulberry Street, Cherry Street, Orchard Street, the Meatpacking District. Turtle Bay, where today you’d be hard-pressed to find turtle soup, and Coney Island, where few coneys—rabbits—survive. The Bowery is named after Peter Stuyvesant’s old Dutch farm, or bouwerij, that it once traversed.

The first Europeans to land in what became New York Harbor found an eater’s paradise: hillsides reddened with ripening strawberries; waters crowded with twelve-inch oysters and six-foot lobsters; walnut and chestnut forests and orchards of sweet apples and pears; skies darkened by throngs of blackbirds, quail, and partridges; grounds replete with gamboling deer, forty-pound wild turkeys, and Native American crops of squash, beans, and maize. For more than a hundred years after the Dutch settled Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx in the 1600s, most everybody raised their own vegetables, pigs, and goats, and the occasional cow. Even after the English took over, many people still brewed their own beer, made their own wine, and tended beehives for honey. But by the early 1800s, new ideas of urbanity and sophistication were at odds with the presence of pigs, goats, and dirt plots of vegetables. New York could not be a world-class city and also collect fertilizer from a manure pit.

The agricultural city became an industrial one; in 1865, Brooklyn had five hundred factories; by 1870, a thousand; by 1880, over five thousand. Suddenly, in a few quick decades at the end of the nineteenth century, the last of the farms became housing. The railroads had laid track for a national food network—no need to grow it all here. The subway and elevated trains allowed people to live farther from the city center, right on top of onetime crops. The idea of factory production became the norm, as sugar refineries, breweries, and wineries thrived throughout the city. Welloff city-born folk saw urban agricultural production as the sign of a dirty rube. New York was a food manufacturing city until after World War II, when planners began to view the city as too big, rich, and important to concern itself with such basic needs as food. The costs of land and labor rose and dirty industry was zoned out of city life. Food production receded from view.

· · ·